The Easel

11th May 2021

Peter Hujar: The Show Must Go On

Laurie Barron | Ocula | 5th May 2021

Once just a minor figure in New York’s downtown subculture, Hujar is now seen as a great of American photography. Especially acclaimed are his meticulous, empathetic portraits. Drag performers were a particular fascination because of their courage to be different as well as the ambiguous dividing line between the person and the performance. Said Nan Goldin “he found beauty and value in every stage of life, and grace in every variety of flesh”.

Apocalypse now: John Akomfrah’s The Unintended Beauty of Disaster

Adrian Searle | The Guardian | 15th April 2021

There is plenty of acclaim for Ghanaian-born, London raised Akomfrah’s new show. His videos don’t offer a single flowing narrative. They are montages of images and video footage, visually different but arranged in “affective proximity”. His current work obviously addresses a #blacklivesmatter moment, but also themes of community, migration and the environment. Says one critic “[Collectively, they] stand among the great bodies of art produced this century”.

Torlonia marbles: An archaeology of a 19th-century antiquities collection

Matthew Symonds | The Past | 23rd April 2021

Easily the best recent piece about this “greatest private collection of ancient Roman antiquity”. The Torlonia marbles tell such human stories. Sculpture collections were initially used to prove one’s Roman heritage. They then became a means of demonstrating wealth and erudition. Radical restorations were undertaken to show modern superiority over the ancients. Oh, and the sculptures …  “of such high aesthetic quality that the visual impression is almost overwhelming.”

Markus Lüpertz: Recent Paintings

Joe Lloyd | Studio International | 3rd May 2021

Lüpertz believes in painting and sculpture only (forget new media) and is impatient with those who think otherwise. Like other post-war German artists, he is labelled a neo-Expressionist but that belies a career marked by “variousness of genres”. He has slalomed between extremes, “abstract and figurative … severity and smirk”, making much of his work “inscrutable”, an artist of prowess but one “easier to respect than enjoy”. A career bio on his 80th birthday is here.

The mystery of the Salvator Mundi: Where has Leonardo da Vinci’s €375m painting gone?

Staff | The Irish Times | 15th April 2021

An update. Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi was to appear in a Louvre exhibition in 2019 but was suddenly withdrawn. A recent documentary claims that the Louvre, having done a secret analysis, doubted da Vinci had painted all of the work. In response, a “widely leaked” document has emerged, seemingly endorsed by a leading da Vinci scholar, stating the Louvre harbored no such doubts. Expect more.

4th May 2021

Easel Essay: Arthur Jafa’s swing

Morgan Meis | The-Easel | 4th May 2021

Jafa was a fringe figure in the art world when, in 2016, he made the video Love is the Message, The message is Death. Its reputation steadily grew. Last year, it was streamed simultaneously by 13 international museums. Wow! Morgan Meis considers why a seven minute video has made Jafa a major art world figure.

“We’ve been taught how swinging works in music for more than a hundred years. One way to look at Love is the message is to see it as an attempt to … make visual images swing. Swing takes it for granted that how you get from A to B matters just as much as that you get from A to B. [Jafa’s] curation and editing of a bunch of short video clips expresses a deeper aesthetic … that is completely particular and completely universal at the same time.”

The cardboard cannabis lab: Thomas Demand’s beautifully deceptive realities

Sean O’Hagan | The Guardian | 22nd March 2021

Demand’s work sneaks up on you. His large scale photographs, seemingly of “real life”, actually show meticulously constructed models of the real thing. Why models? Because they are so pervasive – “computer-generated images, video games … the weather forecast, pension plans. [Models are] a completely overlooked cultural technique.” So, what is reality, disorderly real life or the tidy models we use to make decisions?

The art world knew him as Eli. How Broad was friend and foe to museums

Christopher Knight | LA Times | 30th April 2021

Broad gave generously of his time and money and was instrumental in making Los Angeles a major art destination. Yet his obituaries expose the ambiguities of philanthropy. Large scale philanthropy can create enduring public benefits but, from Broad, it came with a propensity to meddle. Is that any worse than the situation of public museums, blessed with deep collections but hamstrung and exhausted by limited public funding?

Antwaun Sargent’s Guide on How to Really Look at Art

Antwuan Sargent | Interview | 26th April 2021

The great critic Robert Hughes said that art requires the “long look”. Sargent’s advice is a variant on that theme. Start with a “pure experience” of the work. “Move away from five second judgements”. Read the wall text to understand the curator, try to put the work in its cultural context. But mostly, just look … and then look some more.

Obscura No More

Andy Grundberg | The American Scholar | 29th April 2021

A potted history of photography. For its first century, photography stuttered along in aesthetic terms until Warhol and Rauschenberg blurred the line between art and photography. Since then the tsunami of mass media imagery has arrived, allowing photography to shed its “separate-but-not-quite-equal status”. No one now thinks that its images need be literal. It is accepted as “a medium not just for making pictures but also for making meaning.”

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